Yesterday it was announced that GNOME 3.0 is delayed till next year. The extra time has given the Shell Developers some more time to play around with new concepts and they have come up a new mockup. Here are the new mockups.

I think the developers of both GNOME and KDE should get a grip of reality. If they keep heading the current direction, Linux desktop will stay stagnant as it has been for the last 15 years. Between GNOME 1.x and KDE.1x and their latest counterparts, I see 0.1% improvement. Things always not behaving one would expect, broken apps, sluggish windows...even things as simple as copy/paste and drag&drop are misbehaving.

The Linux Desktop is a desktop created with parts of multiple desks sticky taped/glued together. That is all. A big pile of useless stuff. Each part is incompatible either with itself or with the part next to it.

For once, *stop* re-inventing the wheel because you always end up making it square and start fixing the basics.

Linux always seems to be in a "that will be fixed in the next release" loop. They get one part to be stable and some other thing is put in that is half working.
When the next Gnome Shell comes out, it will be 2 years before it is stable. By then some new printing subsystem will be put in that "just needs" to fixed a bit.

I tried KDE 4.4. The notifications occupied half of my screen for no reason at all. You plugged this in, your computer's sleeping, your battery is full, compositing is enabled, compositing is disabled, track changed. What's worse is the stupid Recent notifications feature that SHOULD NOT be displayed if there are ZERO recent notifications. Yes, I know the notifications can be disabled, but it is not ideal at all.

And don't get me started on the abysmal performance of KWin with the binary NVIDIA drivers. Compiz works fine, KWin doesn't.

That's because even Windows 95 met and exceeded all of the computer basics - something KDE and GNOME can only dream of at their current state. I'd pick Windows 95 anytime over the latest KDE and GNOME - especially Windows 95 with IE4 desktop update. The UI is neat and professional with professionally sized widgets (unlike GNOME's gigantic buttons - 4 buttons and nearly quarter of the screen is taken), spaces between icons and widgets equally aligned, dragging files to applications behaves properly, copy&paste works 110% of the time unlike KDE/GNOME, dragging icons to the taskbar works and behaves properly. Even the Office 95 quick launch bar is more user friendly and works better than KDE and GNOME's panel (adding shortcuts via drag and drop).

Yes, the OS itself was crap but the desktop experience and behavior is great.

Only yesterday I tried out the latest KDE and I dragged a text file shortcut to the panel and instead of showing me the text file's real icon, an icon with a preview of the desktop is shown instead. I was actually lucky I managed to add the icon to the panel. I tried adding a second icon and I couldn't do it. No space for the new icon was created....Go figure...

Then there is this stupid option letting you add the text file is a mini editor on the panel. Seriously, how can you come up with these stupid ideas is beyond me. If you do it this way, at least do it properly because the way it is currently implemented is an absolutely absurd and useless.